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→Forward to January 2009...: fixing markup
The '''S'''eneca '''C'''ollege '''O'''pen'''O'''ffice.'''o'''rg '''P'''arty (or '''SCOOoP''', pronounced “scoop”) (Yes, I made this up but it’s a good name and an even better acronym!) began with the goal to compile OOo from source code on the Fedora operating system. I know for some this was a little bit of a stretch because they weren’t very familiar with Fedora, let alone development tools in a Linux environment. Being such a large project (over [[http://marketing.openoffice.org/press_kit.html 750,000 members]] and over 500 committers), there is a horrible problem with the documentation. It’s scattered, it exists in different detail depending on what translation you view, legacy documents were still on the wiki... and so on. Louis was really not kidding when he said that they needed better documentation for developers. Even though I would’ve loved to build on Windows, I know that it was ultimately easier to build on Fedora as there was a lot more written about getting OOo built on Linux than on Windows.
In looking over the actual source code, and from presentations by Ladan and Daeseon, I noticed there was a real lack of understandable comments. There were comments, but some were in different languages, some were just there for dramatic effect (e.g. issuing death threats for changing whatever), but it made it that much harder to understand the C/C++ and UNO code. It isn’t a self-documenting language so it really does add a layer of complexity as you figure out what it means. There’s over [http://marketing.openoffice.org/press_kit.html 10 million lines of code] in OOo, so it’s really easy to get lost.
==Final Thoughts==